Ugly: Giving Us Back Our Beauty Standards

BEFORE UGLY

‘Anita Bhagwandas is really ugly.’

T

HIS WAS AN ANONYMOUS comment left on a digital feature ten years ago, as part of which I was pictured alongside my more conventionally attractive colleagues. Reading it stung. More than stung – it was lacerating. Despite knowing that internet trolls seek pleasure in torturing and the target is largely irrelevant, my mind immediately flipped into a familiar overdrive: did I know them? Had I hurt them somehow, or was a random person so abhorred by the horror of my face that they felt compelled to tell me? In my mind, it was all of the above – particularly the latter.

‘Trolls will be trolls,’ friends consoled when I told them of the incident. The website editor said: ‘These things happen to public-facing women all the time, particularly women of colour,’ when I asked her to take the comment down and she did. This was apparently just a sad fact of our modern technological age and the consensus was to forget all about it. Except that I couldn’t. I couldn’t let the word ‘ugly’ go. My brain slung it around, like a pizza chef tossing elasticated dough into the air and catching it again. It also hurt because this was not new information to me; I’d always felt resoundingly unattractive when it came to my appearance. And now, here was the proof for everyone to see publicly. Had the troll criticised my writing, called me ‘weird-looking’, maybe even the customary ‘fat bitch’ or any other similar insult I’ve received, then perhaps I wouldn’t have been quite so rattled but here was an online confirmation from a stranger of how I really felt about myself. This was indisputably the truth: I was ugly.

There’s something uniquely powerful and destructive about the word ugly. I’ve had a complex relationship with that emotive word for my entire existence. I doubt very much I am the only one. Growing up a plus-sized, dark-skinned Indian girl in Wales in the 1990s and 2000s, I wanted to look like anyone other than myself. It started with my dolls; I coveted their flaxen hair as I brushed it, wishing my frizzy, unwieldy locks looked the same. The girls in teen magazines like Mizz and Bliss that I adored and main love interests on my favourite TV shows all had ‘girl-next-door’ appeal – think Joey Potter in Dawson’s Creek, Marissa Cooper in The O.C. or Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls and their wholesome, effortless, unarguable good looks. All of it made me feel profoundly self-conscious – I genuinely believed people were staring at me because I was so deeply unappealing and odd-looking, so vastly different from what I was very clearly being told was beautiful. Even being average or invisible would have felt like a form of acceptance rather than the searing ugliness I felt. That visceral feeling of being so deeply uncomfortable in my own skin felt physical, as though my insides were clawing their way out of my body, like a zombie emerging from a moss-covered grave.

This discomfort followed me from my teens to university and forwards into adult life – a constant imaginary friend that just won’t let you move on and is always there to remind you of your lowly place in the world. Like many who lack all confidence, I developed a strong line in self-deprecation – the kind that makes you aggressively defiant and assume somebody must be obliterated on tequila if they dare pay you an appearance-based compliment. At work, I self-defined as the LOL-wielding office goth but inside, I felt like the unattractive underdog, outwardly jovial despite my caustically low self-esteem with a secret fear that my looks were holding me back, professionally and personally.

As an adult, I’ve tried diligently to ‘fix’ my ‘ugly’ problem. As the saying goes, God loves a trier and, trust me, I tried hard — so I’m definitely going to Heaven. To fix my appearance from the outside, I’ve embarked on multiple extreme diets, cleanses and detox retreats; I’ve taken appetite suppressants and spent endless hours researching various weight-loss surgeries. I have obsessed over beauty products, techniques and treatments, hoping they might make me feel more beautiful. To fix my internal issues, I’ve undergone hypnosis and done years of talk therapy; even my degree in philosophy came back to appearance (‘What is the existential definition of beauty in classical art?’ my dissertation pondered). Yet, no matter how much time and money I spent, the malaise still lingered, hovering like an unwelcome Dementor ready to snatch my self-esteem at any opportunity. I did all this work, unpicked all my issues and, while there were some small shifts in my mindset, still that feeling of ugliness, of wrongness, deep within my core was quick to surface when activated. When my then boyfriend cheated on me, ‘ugly’ was the reason my heartbroken brain gave me for the betrayal (rather than the reality of him simply being a sack of shit). When I narrowly missed out on a dream job despite being overqualified, ‘not looking the part’ was my default reasoning (rather than the nepotism so often at play in these decisions). However hard I tried to fight it, like a gradual decay, feeling ugly left nothing untouched; it popped up everywhere, as envy within my friendships, self-doubt in my relationships and toxic perfectionism in my work. Everything was contaminated by its malevolent, self-harming hold. Ugly, to me, has felt like a tattoo you can’t ever erase; you’re branded with it for life no matter what you change or try to.

To say that navigating ‘ugly’ shaped my life is an understatement. It affected everything, including my career trajectory, that eventually led to me becoming a beauty editor. In my mid-twenties, I was working as a features assistant, but beauty was my second job: I was spending all my money on beauty products, reading about it obsessively and writing about it for anyone who would let me – I even started a (terrible) beauty blog. I knew I wanted to be a beauty journalist more than anything else, and I didn’t just love beauty, I was compelled by it (subconsciously did I have something to prove to myself? You bet!). I made the switch to beauty journalism and it was everything I’d hoped for and more: I met my make-up artist heroes and had the appearance of a very glamorous, enviable life. More importantly, I was able to write for and connect with the women that, like me, magazines and the beauty industry had largely ignored. Those issues cut so deeply for me, and for them too, that it didn’t seem fluffy, or superfluous in the way some might see beauty journalism. But I felt a dark side to my chosen path. Unsurprisingly, being surrounded by constant perfection, from models to the classically pretty and perfectly coiffed beauty editors I compared myself to meant that internally I felt worse than ever. My perceived ugliness was more than mere inner turmoil, I believed it to be an immovable fact. I had forcibly put myself into the very world that I’d felt so alien from. Why? To finally be part of something that had eluded me my entire life – beauty. I hoped that being around so much of it meant that it would finally rub off on me, but instead, I felt uglier than ever.

Working on the inside of the beauty industry, I started to notice some changes – or, at least, to a point. Around 2010, social media like Instagram and Twitter gave people a voice and more control over what magazines and brands were creating for them, eroding the carefully crafted elitism and exclusion that formed the basis of the narrative in women’s media that I’d been chipping away at from the inside. Campaigns started to become more inclusive on a surface level (though they still rarely featured disabled people, anyone genuinely plus size or with dark skin) and the beauty product launches I attended daily finally, for example, offered shades of foundation in my skin tone and informed me that instead of trying to fit in, I should feel ‘empowered’. I didn’t. Now, consumers were increasingly being told to ‘love the skin you’re in’ or feel like you’re ‘worth it’ – both applaudable sentiments. But I’d felt invisible and therefore ugly from my earliest years of playing with my blonde-haired Barbies: a few size-14 models on a catwalk weren’t going to eradicate all of that conditioning. It’s not a magic switch that flips your self-perception to ‘beautiful’ after so long of being told you’re the opposite.

In recent years, I’ve admired elements of the body-positivity movement, giving the original fat-acceptance movement of the 1960s a new voice. But I could still see a clear divide: how could some achieve a state of body neutrality, acceptance or even self-love like those body-positivity influencers whose confidence I so admired, and others – myself included – just couldn’t? If things were becoming more inclusive and we were seeing different forms of beauty and body shapes, why hadn’t anything I’d tried to fix my self-loathing worked? Why did I still feel like this? Something I hadn’t yet identified was keeping me lodged in this web of self-hatred. I was angry at myself too – I was well versed in the feminist theory and cultural criticism on how the capitalist patriarchal agenda has used beauty standards against women as a means of controlling our bodies and our behaviour – deep down, I think we all know that. Logically, I knew I now had permission to embrace my looks, but ugly was so deeply ingrained in me that it wouldn’t let me go. More than anything else I wanted to be finally free of its clutches, but there was obviously a missing piece to this exhausting puzzle.

So, I started to ask: what is beauty exactly and who gets to define it? In other words, what was at the heart of the standards I didn’t feel I measured up to and – more importantly – who set them? Beauty standards are a societally agreed set of ideals that, through culture, become a benchmark that people are required to meet to be considered beautiful, pretty, attractive. In Western society, in the last century in particular, the dominant beauty ideal for women has been slim, able-bodied, white and blue-eyed – the Eurocentric or Western beauty standard. But the thing with beauty standards is that we accept them as a fact, but they aren’t – who decided that this was the only way to be beautiful and that everything outside of this was ugly? And how exactly do they create that destructive and harmful void – ‘the ugly gap’ – between how we actually look and how we think we should look?

I started researching historical beauty trends to try and get a sense of where these standards come from, just for my own interest. As soon as you do this, you can immediately see how beliefs and assumptions about beauty have changed wildly across decades and eras – so how can something be ‘fact’ if it changes so often? As the British actor and comedian Dawn French once said: ‘If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model . . . Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush.’ Just in my lifetime thus far, I’ve seen the shift from the size-zero body ideal I grew up with in the early noughties to the extreme hourglass shape of the Kardashians we have today, which shows signs of teetering back again with a noughties fashion revival and reported return of ‘heroin chic’. How will we look back at our current beauty standards from the vantage point of the future? Current practices, like our obsession with lip filler or cosmetic surgery, could so easily end up as unbelievable curiosities in beauty history – up there with Elizabethan lead-based make-up and Victorian diet pills containing parasites – much sooner than we think in our fast-paced, trend-led world.

Plenty has been written to justify the evolutionary reasons why we are attracted to certain appearance markers that signal health and/or fertility. And yet evidence that there is an ideal beauty backed up by science is pretty scant – and what there is only takes a little probing before it starts to crack. Take the persistent idea of facial symmetry equalling an ideal beauty. It originated as a mathematical concept in Ancient Greece and since then science has told us that an asymmetrical face could be seen as a sign of weakness and off-putting biologically in a mate, so the more symmetrical our faces, the more attractive we are. But the studies on this have often included a very small number of participants. More recently, researchers at the University of Antwerp analysed the data around beauty symmetry and found that this theory doesn’t really hold up when you analyse larger quantities of people.¹ And when we look at people widely held as attractive, like model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Hollywood actor Ryan Gosling, we realise that they often have a visible asymmetry to their faces. A 2014 study which compared 3D scans of 5,000 teenagers alongside their medical history also found no correlation to health and symmetry of the face.² It makes me wonder why I’ve spent most of my adult life trying, and failing, to make my eyebrows match and look symmetrical, when it means nothing.

Researching beauty standards didn’t offer all the answers I was searching for, so I turned to the concept of ugly, which has been illuminating beyond belief. We all know that calling somebody ugly is the most cutting and definitive of all insults. Once it’s levelled as a blistering attack it’s like a rocket destined for space, with no way to recall it or retract the impact it has on us. We feel the word ugly – and its implied meaning – to our deepest core because it is immediately ‘othering’ – a term used to describe the practice of designating someone, or a group of people, as ‘not one of us’. This practice is often particularly directed towards marginalised groups, to reinforce their deviation from the norm or ideal.

The word ugly has been so seamlessly integrated into our culture that its meaning feels like a universally agreed fact, but it has picked up meanings and attributes over time. In English, the word ugly is believed to be medieval in its historical origin, coming from the Old Norse uggligr, meaning ‘to be feared or dreaded’. Other definitions of ugly such as Greek dyseides, Latin deformis, Irish dochrud and Sanskrit ku-rupa suggest that it means ‘ill-shaped’. Another Germanic origin defines the sentiment of ugly as ‘hate, sorrow’. Over time its meaning has become more explicit – in 1755 influential writer ‘Dr’ Samuel Johnson created the first English dictionary using both ‘ugliness’ and ‘deformity’ as interchangeable terms linking them with having a poor moral compass too.³ Over time, disabled people in America were subject to the ‘Ugly Laws’ in place from 1880s —1970s, aimed to prohibit visibly disabled people from visiting public spaces – they were fined or sent to poorhouses as a result.⁴ It wasn’t until the 1960s that laws started to be passed to actively protect the rights of disabled people in the US. In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act came into force in 1995.⁵

Throughout history, it’s also evident that the price of ugly has been far less perilous for men than women (and those of other gender identities). In Roman mythology, Vulcan, the god of fire, was considered so ugly at birth that his own mother threw him over a cliff; though he survived, prospered, and went on to marry Venus, the beautiful goddess of love (back off, Richard Curtis, that rom-com plot idea is mine.) Back in the mid-1700s, there was even a group of white men who turned ugliness into the first ‘Ugly Face Club’ in Liverpool. Members had to be male, bachelors and have features that were ugly, though Ugly Clubs – as these social fraternities were generally known – were not welcoming to disabled people. For them it was a way to bond, sit in coffeehouses and drink ale.⁶ Women, however, have always contended with ‘ugliness’ as a problem to solve and a disadvantage for a good marriage. Winston Churchill’s infamous quote encapsulates this double standard to perfection: ‘My dear you are ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be ugly.’⁷ And, when I sat down to start this chapter, I googled ‘ugly’, to see the top hits, which were ‘ugly face’ followed by ‘ugly girl’ – and before you ask, ‘ugly boy’ was not on the list.

One of the biggest contributors to our definition of ugly I uncovered? Freakshows. The concept of laughing at somebody unusual, or ‘abnormal’ had long been seen as sport. They became particularly popular in the Victorian era. Often freakshow acts were compared to animals as an underhand way of dehumanising them and reducing their worth to sub-human, like Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew, a 19th-century Russian man also known as Dog-Faced Boy because of his hirsute face (the result of a medical condition called hypertrichosis.) Another example is Sara (Saartjie) Baartman, who was part of the Khoikhoi tribe of South Africa, nicknamed the ‘de Hottentot Venus’ (Hottentot was a colonial Dutch-given slur to describe the Khoikhoi people.) Baartman and women of her tribe had steatopygia, a genetic build-up of fat, which could result in very prominent buttocks and elongated labia. She spent years starring in European freakshows and being ordered to perform ‘tricks’ wearing nothing but a loin cloth. She died in 1815 aged just 26, though the cause isn’t known exactly, but the dehumanising treatment didn’t end there: her brain, skeleton and sexual organs were obtained and remained in display jars at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris until 1974 and weren’t buried in South Africa until 2002. Freakshow line-ups would also include those who were heavily tattooed, non-white, intersex, bearded ladies or had any visible disabilities. They endured peering crowds, prodding and mocking as part of a system of exploitation that had become a pillar of Western entertainment.

Patterns in shifting beauty standards are more than just historical oddities, they are warnings that can provide the missing piece between knowing we deserve to feel good about ourselves and truly understanding why we still don’t. As I read about the concept of ugly through the ages and the accompanying social history of the time, I felt a small shift in my ‘ugly’ mindset – like a train gearing up to change course to another track. That’s when the pennies dropped, like one of those arcade games where the coins tip painfully slowly over the edge. Penny 1: ‘ugly’ must serve somebody’s agenda because its definition changes so often and so drastically. Penny 2: ‘ugly’ isn’t fact, it’s a construct. That means that ugly can – in theory – be rewritten because it was created by somebody in the first place. Why hasn’t it already? The systems that benefit from us feeling ugly prevent this change from happening, because it serves their agenda to keep us feeling sad, lacking and preoccupied with our appearance.

Almost as far as we can go back, we can find evidence of women contorting themselves to fit trends, to correct what the beauty standards of the day told them was ‘wrong’ with their bodies. Seeing how long this has been going on and examining why it happened can give us insights into how those ideals became a boundary in the first place, dividing ugly and beautiful into distinct camps. Centuries of conditioning have made us believe that to be beautiful, admired, successful, rich and happy we must fit between certain aesthetic parameters, which are changing all the time — and hide a host of inconsistencies. As Dr Hannah McCann, a cultural studies lecturer at the University of Melbourne, said in the literary journal Overland: ‘To suggest that there are universal ideals of beauty that transcend culture completely fails to comprehend the way that ideals of beauty have been constructed in order to be sold.’⁸ Since the beginning of consumer culture, there have been companies offering to take our money in return for their ‘help’ in contorting or changing ourselves to fit into these narrow frameworks of beauty.

You might think, considering the progress made in women’s rights and liberation in the last century, we would have broken free of some of the restrictive cultural norms placed on our bodies, yet we still have much of the same malaise as the Victorians did, just in modern guises. As stated in The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, the game-changing book addressing patriarchal beauty standards: ‘The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us.’ Although the book was written in 1990, (and its author has now strayed into widely discredited territory), it’s through beauty standards that the patriarchy still retains subtle but unmistakable ways to limit us. A woman can be a CEO, a prime minister or a scientist, but she is inevitably still judged and valued by her appearance first, in a way that doesn’t happen to men, or is written off as a forgivable quirk (hello, Boris Johnson’s unbrushed hair). The more space women take up in society, the more freedoms and equalities we have, the more we are heard: the more malevolent beauty ideals become.

In 2020, research by the British government found that a huge 61 per cent of adults (and 66 per cent of children) felt negative about their body image most of the time. Six out of ten women felt that ‘diet culture, post-partum pressures, being bombarded with images of photoshopped, edited and sexualised women as well as the aging process and the lack of visual representation of older women . . . causes them to suffer with poor body image,’ the report said. Seventy one per cent of disabled people (compared to 60 per cent able-bodied) reported feeling negative about their body image, while also ‘feeling ignored, judged and isolated about their appearance’. None of the transgender people taking part in the above research felt ‘very positive’ about their body image and 23 per cent reported feeling mostly ‘very negative’ about their looks (compared to 12 per cent of cisgender participants). One transgender woman said: ‘I have gone from hating my body due to dysphoria to hating my body due to pressures on women to conform.’ BAME (Black Asian and Minority Ethnic) participants said their ‘body image was negatively impacted by lack of representation across media and advertising especially plus size BAME women, particularly those with dark skin and unrelaxed afro-textured hair.’⁹ These findings also show how truly miserable we still are about our appearance, like our mothers often were and perhaps their mothers too, and just like women in the history books I’d read about also were. In this age of wellness and an increasing focus on mental health we are still being made to feel we don’t measure up and that our worth lies in conforming to beauty norms. We’ve been told we can be ourselves and look how we want, but how much has really changed?

This question underpins our current beauty narrative and its conflicting ideals. While there has been a move to acceptance of a slightly wider beauty standard across magazines, advertising and the beauty industry in recent years, it still feels dismissive, limited and hierarchical. If our social media body-positive ad campaigns are to be believed, it’s just cis, white, heterosexual, able-bodied women struggling with their appearance. Our current version of inclusivity often cherry-picks ‘representation’ without acknowledging that it’s still very limited. You really don’t have to spend long asking what is making us feel so negatively about ourselves before you start to realise that beauty standards are woven into everything we touch, believe and consume, even categories we think are progressive. Like an invisible foe, they sit on our shoulders, constantly keeping us oppressed by reinforcing gender stereotypes, colourism, classism, ageism, ableism, sizeism and many more. We are told what is beautiful at every turn; to deviate, makes you a dissenter – it makes you ugly. But what I learned as I researched this book is how so many of our beauty standards have their origins in some of the darkest recesses in human history. As I aim to show you in these chapters, what we are told is ‘beautiful’ is often based on some very ugly truths. Without acceptance and knowledge of this, we’ll never truly be free of their toxic reign – or be able to hold those accountable who still perpetuate the damaging narratives.

Each day, we unknowingly adorn ourselves in these historic beauty standards, as we look in the mirror, get dressed and do our make-up. This book is a journey to uncovering some of those origins and the systems of oppression that hold them in place, piecing together how they could still be affecting how we feel about ourselves now, centuries later. I am not a historian or an academic – and even work from those brilliant fields can come to us with biases, embedded in the historical record and still present in how we discuss it today. I am also very aware that I can’t possibly cover everything or represent everyone’s own lived experience – my editors must be already wringing their hands over my never-ending research – but hopefully within each chapter everyone can find something that will help you to think more clearly about the mechanisms behind contemporary beauty and unpick something you previously believed about your appearance.

A note on gender and this book: beauty standards affect people of all genders and gender identities, of course, but have a particular impact on women and people who are transgender, non-binary, or gender-non-conforming, because the patriarchy still exists and exerts control over those of us who deviate from cisgender heterosexual traditional masculinity and femininity. There is a historical legacy of ‘appearance norms’ that affects us all, but especially those of us who identify or present as women, as well as those who experience oppression for their perceived womanhood or femininity, such as gay and trans men. Throughout this book, I’ve used the term ‘women’ (rather than ‘womxn’, for example) and phrases like ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ because these words reflect the gender stereotypes and constructs that have defined our binary mainstream culture, government policy and beauty standards throughout much of history (particularly post-colonisation, as academic Dr Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí has noted).

Gender binaries are a huge part of how we are sold beauty and beauty ideals too; just look at the way fragrance is marketed to men or women. We’re told that sweet floral scents are for women, and woody, smoky notes are for men, but anyone can wear any scent. They’ve been gendered for us and now we associate them with how men and women ‘should’ smell. Another example is how long hair on women has traditionally been perceived as more ‘feminine’. I’ve used the terms ‘woman’ and ‘man’ because that’s predominantly how history has been contextualised – even if I personally see the world in a much more inclusive way. My use of ‘women’ includes transgender women – and while I can’t speak to this or the non-binary experience, the beauty standards and general consensus of ‘ugly’ inevitably impacts on both those assigned male and female at birth, as well as intersex people. The heterosexual, cis gaze has been so dominant that our current beauty standards still largely reflect that history. This binary, gendered view of beauty in the mainstream has of course excluded many and adds an extra layer of intersectional intricacy as we begin to unpick beauty standards.

What does cut across everyone’s realities though is our increasing dissatisfaction with our appearance. Male beauty myths and constructs could fill an entire complex tome of their own – and this is a vital discussion to have. However, I do believe the power of ‘ugly’ can wound women in a very specific way (and some women more than others). As I have been writing this, Lee Canning, a member of the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party, tweeted a picture of former leader of Plaid Cymru Leanne Wood with the words: ‘the ugly face of nationalism’.¹⁰ Imagine, just for a moment, that this charge was levelled at a man, with his picture, instead of a woman. Somehow its potency and severity seem a little less piercing, right? This insult ‘ugly’ just doesn’t have the same impact or roll off the tongue quite so viciously when addressed to a man. While men deemed unattractive by the beauty standards of their day have nonetheless enjoyed great power, wealth and influence, a woman’s appearance has always been and still is her currency and marker of value in society. Women have to be decorative to be of worth. Part of the blame for this belongs to the ‘male gaze’ – this is a term first used by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, and later coined and popularised by Laura Mulvey specifically in reference to narrative cinema — although the term is often used outside of feminist/film/art theory circles. That exists everywhere we look, from male-dominated industries like advertising to the largely male-directed films we watch – it’s truly inescapable, as you’ll see.

What has also become clear to me is that, despite all the apparent progress, the Western gaze remains hugely dominant – and the legacy of colonisation and slavery